Jacqui McShannon, director of children’s safeguarding and specialist services at Hounslow council, and Councillor Tom Bruce, the council’s cabinet member for education, children and youth services talk to Community Care about the ‘good’ judgment that Hounslow council’s children’s services recently received from Ofsted.
The council was praised by Ofsted for its “timely and effective” front door service and the “highly aspirational” social work for children in care and care leavers. Senior leaders were cited as having a “a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and areas for further development, underpinned by regular performance monitoring, quality assurance audits and a thorough and accurate self-assessment”. McShannon and Bruce discuss with Community Care how the council remains transparent and encourages challenge and scrutiny of its service.
The full list of questions, posed by Community Care associate editor Sarah Dennis, is:
1)How does the senior leadership team maintain contact with the frontline and their knowledge of how the service is being run?
2)What do you think have been the core strengths of Hounslow children’s services since the previous inspection and do you feel these were reflected in Ofsted’s reporting?
3)How was the inspection process managed within the senior leadership teams and indeed wider teams?
4)What has been the effect of the strong political and corporate support that children’s services receive from the wider council, and how has this benefitted?
5)What ‘further capacity’ is being built to cope with the unprecedented demand referred to in the report?
6)How has the partnership approach been strengthened and what are the next steps that senior leaders want to take to continue that journey?
7)Ofsted were particularly complimentary about the quality of services for children in care – how have social workers been enabled to be ‘aspirational’ for this group of children, and how have senior leaders embedded an effective monitoring process?
8)What is what Ofsted termed as the ‘well-established’ system for permanence options, and how has the adoption service been improved since the last inspection?
9)Can you describe some of the performance monitoring and auditing methods the service operates and how these are utilised and analysed?
10)Given the improvements in performance monitoring, how will the service look to improve supervision recording, particularly in light of Ofsted stating that social workers are speaking positively about the supervision they receive?
11)What methods have been used to help stabilise the workforce and what are the training and management support offers that Ofsted refers to?
12)And finally what are the next stages in Hounslow’s journey?